Abstract
Recent trends combine smart phones with social networking platforms to bring new opportunities that can enable people to collaborate anywhere and at any time. For example, organisations can be given the opportunity to recruit part-time job seekers such as software developers using social media tools. Previously, collaboration was static in nature, but today loosely enabled collaboration needs to support flexible schedules, ad hoc processes and members that may not be known in advance. Furthermore, current crowdsourcing platforms that enable software developers to contribute their skills to projects do not meet the social needs of participants as they collaborate. This paper presents a cost-effective approach to collaboration that aims to assist users to find suitable collaborators to team up with. The proposed Collaboration Circles application is able to find the best time to collaborate using Google+, Google calendar and a weighted assignment algorithm. The Collaboration Circles application includes features such as the administration of collaborative task activities and communication channels. The Collaboration Circles application is implemented as an Android social network application supported by Google tools. The application is experimentally evaluated to demonstrate that the Collaboration Circles application successfully supports collaboration in the virtual world.
